5 players from the KPL who made it to different IPL teams
The Karnataka Premier League (KPL), into its fifth season this year, has carved a niche for itself in terms of nurturing talents at the grassroots level in the state of Karnataka. Over the past four seasons, the KPL has seen young cricketers emerge from the streets of the state and make it big on the international stage. Not only does the league provide opportunities to young cricketers to showcase their talent, it also makes it easier for the state associations hunting for fresh talents to spot them; now that they come under an organisational structure. While not all of them can make it to the international level, the league in itself also provides a viable financial option for the cricketers to sustain themselves, which is also something that is hard to come by, especially for sportspersons in India.
The four KPL seasons have seen many cricketers evolve to the next level, and have also given the Indian cricket team some of its most promising young recruits. Most of them, to be honest, have made their way there through the Indian Premier League (IPL) – which is the godfather of all such leagues at the state level – that has not only become the biggest annual sporting festival of the country, but has also become a stairway to admission into the national cricketing ranks. In this piece, we enlist five Karnataka cricketers to have made it to different IPL teams based on their performances in the KPL.
#1 Karun Nair
One of the brightest young prospects to knock on the doors of the Indian cricket team over the past two years or so has been the young Karnataka batsman, Karun Nair. Nair first appeared onto the scenes in the very first edition of the league, wherein he played for Mangalore United for 3 matches and scored 46 runs, after which he was dropped. In the next season, however, Nair exhibited an improved performance in the following season as he scored 140 runs from 7 matches and helped his team lift the KPL title for the first time.
After a three-year hiatus – as no KPL was organised in 2011, 2012 and 2013 – when the league returned to life in 2014, Nair had already made a name for himself through the IPL, wherein he had played for the Rajasthan Royals that season and scored 330 runs from 11 matches at an average of 33.00 and a strike rate of 142. This success translated into another remarkable performance in the following KPL season, wherein, in the 2014 season, the right-handed batsman scored 302 runs from 7 matches at an average of 60.40 and a strike-rate of 123.77.
The runs kept flowing through his bat the following season as well, as in 2015, Nair scored 197 runs from 5 matches at 65.67 and a strike-rate of 135, after a bleak IPL season the same year that saw him garner just 181 runs from 14 games at 16.45. Thereafter, the 24-year-old had a superb 2016 season in the IPL, scoring 357 runs from 14 games for the Delhi Daredevils – with the franchise recruiting him for the young brigade that they intended to build – and deservedly received his team India call-up for the tour of Zimbabwe in June.